The Fúcares Gallery in Madrid is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by Jaime Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963).

Despacio/Destiempo [“Slowly/Out of sync”] brings together a number of pieces made in 2012, although one of them, Momentum, is part of an eponymous series that the artist has been creating since 1997. The elements shown in the exhibition make up a sort of symbolic archaeology about what, in statistical terms, we refer to as social cost. Retrieved from the streets, from the Internet or from the world of museums, they serve as tragicomic testimonies of our processes of adaptation in a capitalistic environment.

The following pieces are included in the exhibition:

Momentum (2012)

Bits and pieces from a wardrobe rescued from the street and reassembled so that they can be contained in its only drawer, while the wardrobe itself remains precariously upright. A metaphor for human beings and their struggle to remain standing, using everything that they were originally given to build their personas.

If the framework in which the pieces in this series is of an ontological nature, the location of its raw materials (discarded furniture gathered from the streets) draws a map of the districts in the cities where the artist has lived and that have undergone a process of gentrification which politicises it (so here the root polis acquires makes perfect sense). The work therefore tackles the question of adaptation to the environment, focussing on the human flotsam and jetsam that this process entails.

Hence the use of remains of materials produced and discarded by man as a metaphor for man himself, and the manipulation of objects that eventually refer back to themselves but are unable to go beyond themselves. The result leads to an isolated man, removed from the inertia of his context.

Personal quest (2012)

A list was prepared starting from what YouTube offers you when typing the letters of the alphabet in its search window.

From A to Z, the window that automatically opens when entering each of the letters of the alphabet has been taken out of context and replicated. This floating window appears as if printed on a sheet of white, A4 photographic paper – in other words, a standardised format.

The search for oneself, derived from a spiritual existential loss is here substituted by a shared ritual. The suggestions that appear when entering each letter are the result of millions of personal searches on the Web at particular coordinates of time and geography. They reflect our own standardised conduct, reduce us to statistical data, and dilute our very individuality: there is nothing personal left in this search, nor does anything transcendental appear in its result.

Projector (2012)

At the back of the gallery, a slide projector projects texts on the wall that, slide after slide, deconstruct the rationale of their own presence in the gallery room. The meaning of the text shifts little by little from a technical description of the elements involved in the mise-en-scène, via the consequences in economic terms and of credibility that a potential acquisition by a knowledgeable viewer would have, finally suggesting the existence of certain mechanisms, which, being similar to those used for steering people in disciplinary societies, are subliminally activated in the institutional sphere of art. The projector itself, an apparently inoffensive element, can thus be one of them.